HGST Joins Open Compute Project To Help Define Best Practices For Datacentre Storage

Open Compute Summit (Booth C7), 17 January 2013–HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and now a Western Digital company, NASDAQ: WDC) today announced that it has joined the Open Compute Project, an initiative launched by Facebook in 2011, to increase technology efficiencies and reduce the environmental impacts of datacentres.

With the explosion of data resulting from mobile devices, Internet services, social media and business applications, corporate, cloud and big data customers are constantly looking for ways to improve their storage infrastructure costs and their bottom line. The Open Compute Project applies open-source software principles to the hardware industry to drive the development of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. HGST will contribute its expertise toward defining storage solutions that deliver the performance and density required while achieving low total cost of ownership (TCO) reflected in metrics such as cost-per-terabyte, watt-per-TB, TB-per-system weight and TB-per-square foot.

“Demand for storage is booming as IT managers strive to handle the avalanche of new data being generated by cloud datacentres, Big Data analytics, social networking, HD video and millions of mobile devices,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at HGST. “As a strategic drive supplier and consultant to Facebook and in collaboration with the Open Compute Project, we’re defining best practices in the storage industry to afford end-users with greater capital savings, operational efficiencies and energy conservation in the datacentre.”

The fourth Open Compute Summit is January 16-17, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center – 5001 Great America Parkway in Santa Clara, Calif. As a Summit sponsor, HGST will be showcasing its Ultrastar™ 4TB enterprise-class HDD, the world’s first 4TB enterprise-class hard drive, which provides space-efficient, high-performance, low-power storage for traditional enterprises as well as for the explosive big data and cloud/Internet markets where storage density, watt-per-gigabyte and cost-per-GB are critical parameters. The 4TB Ultrastar 7K4000 family raises the bar with a five-year limited warranty and a 2.0 million hours MTBF specification, resulting in a 40 percent lower annualised failure rate (AFR) than enterprise drives rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF. As a leader in enterprise-class SAS SSDs, HGST will also be showcasing its Ultrastar enterprise-class SSDs that meet the performance, capacity, endurance and reliability demands of today’s Tier 0, mission-critical datacentre applications.